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Comment by Barrin92 | Hacker News Reader

send is nice but my favorite tool by far in this category is magic wormhole

https://magic-wormhole.readthedocs.io/en/latest/welcome.html

it only relies on a third party for a handshake rather than storing files online, so there's no limit to what you can send and it's probably less likely to go away.

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Or croc!

https://github.com/schollz/croc

Yeah, I switched from magic wormhole to croc for simplicity/snappiness over magic wormhole. Static binaries!

croc it is!

Do you know how secure it is compared to Magic Wormhole?

I remember a few years ago reading a comparison between two file sharing apps, and if my memory serves me they were croc and Magic Wormhole. One of them had a litany of security holes but I don't remember which of them. I googled but couldn't find info on this.

I am very interested in hearing this. I always wondered what's what with MW.

AFAIK security experts swear by MW and don't like Croc as much, because of the wonky protocol, but don't quote me on this.

One for croc https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27052840#27056746

I use the go version[1] implementation, for a bit easier installation.

[1]: https://github.com/psanford/wormhole-william

I feel like I'm slowly becoming a Nix shill, but... Nix is a good alternative as well.

Install Nix in one command:

    sh <(curl -L https://nixos.org/nix/install) --no-daemon

Then run Magic Wormhole in one command, without even having to install it:

    nix-shell -p magic-wormhole --run 'wormhole send myfile'

I've been trying out Nix lately and did something similar to get a croc binary. My system package manager didn't have croc and also didn't have the Go version required to compile croc, but Nix did have the latest Go.

Ran this:

  nix-shell -p go --run "go install github.com/schollz/croc/v9@latest"

and got it compiled. In retrospect, I should have just used the croc package in Nix, but the simplicity of this approach is a vast improvement over the alternative of getting Go myself and cluttering up my system with random build tools for one-off compilations.

The go version has a really cool feature: wormhole-william send --qr <path/to/file>

This prints the password as a QR code. There's also an android version of wormhole-william which can process the QR codes.

The similar (but different) tool I use is Web Wormhole (https://webwormhole.io/#). It does the same thing but through a Web UI and uses WebRTC under the hood. Its great benefit over magic Wormhole is that the target doesn't need to install anything at all. If I'm having a Teams/Zoom/Jitsi call and I want to send a large file I can just send them a link and then drag and drop.

Portal does much of the same but is usually quicker in sending files than both croc and magic wormhole, since files are effectively compressed before sending among other things [note: I'm one of the creators of Portal].

https://github.com/SpatiumPortae/portal

That logo...

(cool software anyhow)

send was pretty much inspired by magic wormhole.

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